01 February 2008

Today I am physically exhausted. After two days of hard gardening, a night of
African dance class, a night of Capuera class, a week of Tai Chi and many nights
of rustled sleep, I feel that I have reached some sort of peak. The problem is
that I don’t want to stop. I don’t want to miss anything; I don’t want to pull
myself away.
It looks like we are actually going to start the semester now. A week of
community building was more than enough for us and it is exciting to start
focusing in. I somewhat reluctantly put myself in a base group focused on the
“social” aspect of our studies. Though social makes sense for what I have been
studying at university, I had wanted to force myself another way for this
semester. Specifically, I have been interested in learning more about the
ecological sides of Auroville. However, in coming together with the other five
in my base group I realize how much I can get out of learning with them.
Another part of our semester is that we all have a “service learning” project,
which is an internship of our choice. There are so many cool things I can do
but I’m focusing in on farms. I’m looking into working on Fertility Farm, the
Healing farm, or the Buddhist Garden. However, I also might slither my way into
an internship at the Pony Farm. No, seriously. If I don’t actually work with
the horses I am going to volunteer on my time off to work there and hopefully on
Sundays do the therapeutic riding with handicap children.
I guess I’m getting overwhelmed by how much I want to do here. So many amazing
classes and workshops, activities that I can be a part of…and that I want to be.
However, I am caught in this feeling of “well if not now, when else?”. I was
so proud of myself for going to the African dance class because it truly is
something I’ve always wanted to do but just felt so incredibly intimidated. Now
I feel very committed to working at it, getting better. One of these days I’ll
be able to toss my body indiscriminately around. And hte capeura class was
really cool too. it is a mix of tai chi moves, but sped up to African dance
music; its like African dance-fighting. I'm better at that than at african
dance so far.
We are also chanting and meditating a lot. I love the chanting though I'm not
so good at the meditating part. Auroville is by rule not a religious place but
has a huge emphasis on spirituality, evolving spirituality. So its been really
great for me to delve into that stuff too.